Share This

Living in a caring community may help curb teenage alcohol use, while hanging out with antisocial peers can have the opposite effect, according to Penn State researchers studying substance abuse patterns.

Related Articles

The researchers evaluated how seven different categories of risk and protective factors predicted teen alcohol use. Risk factors included antisocial attitudes, antisocial behaviors, association with antisocial peers and family risk. Protective factors were positive community experiences, positive school experiences and family strengths.

Damon Jones, research assistant professor in the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development, and colleagues analyzed which factors were more or less likely to predict eighth and 10th graders' reports of how much alcohol they drank during the past month. The researchers reported their findings in a recent issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

"We found that when you put all of the major risk and protective factors into the same predictive model, certain risk factors, such as antisocial peer risk, tended to be more highly predictive of alcohol use than other factors like positive school experiences," said Jones.

The researchers looked at results for over 200,000 students from five large datasets to assess how these factors predicted alcohol use. They discovered that individual, family and peer risk factors as well as the community protective factor each moderately predicted alcohol use. However, family and school protective factors had less influence than the other factors when all were considered together.

Their analysis also showed that the impact of teens' own antisocial attitudes and friendship with antisocial peers depended on the wider context. Those two risk factors were not as strongly associated with alcohol use when teens reported positive experiences in the community. These findings suggest that positive experiences in the community at large can help sever the link between risk factors and underage drinking.

Jones's findings fit hand-in-hand with the work of Mark E. Feinberg, research professor in the Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development. Feinberg worked on this study and also authored a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health that discussed new ideas for helping communities find the best and most effective strategies for preventing adolescent substance use.

"If we're talking about teenagers and their initiation of substance use, we want to know which kids are most likely to start using drugs, drinking alcohol or binge drinking," said Feinberg. "We want to know if the kids who are most likely to start drinking have risk factors that distinguish them from the rest of the population -- in terms of their family life, the peers that they hang out with, their own individual attitudes, and perhaps their own social-emotional adjustment and confidence to manage their emotions and tolerate frustration.

"If we can understand which of those factors are the most important predictors, we can target our prevention resources in a more effective way. Right now we really don't know in a causal sense, or even in a considered correlational sense, which factors are key. Are they all equal? If not, we should apportion our prevention dollars accordingly."

Feinberg also said that an important next step for the field, which his team has already been working on, is to determine if some risk factors are more or less important given certain kinds of community contexts.

"We have already found that the relation of risk and protective factors to underage drinking depends in part on the community a kid is living in," said Feinberg. "We now want to examine whether certain risk factors are more important in certain types of communities, such as rural versus suburban versus urban or high versus low income. If we can drill down to that level, we can become even more precise in how we target precious prevention resources by targeting the most important risk factors in each community."

Understanding which teenagers are at risk will allow for more effective prevention strategies.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse supported this work.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Penn State. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

More From ScienceDaily

More Mind & Brain News

Featured Research

Mar. 3, 2015 — No significant change in home habits of smokers have been observed in the aftermath of a ban on smoking in public spaces, researchers report. Greater inspiration to kick the habit likely comes from ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Heart function has been associated with the development of dementia and Alzheimer's disease through a new study. Participants with decreased heart function, measured by cardiac index, were two to ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Children of recently separated or divorced families are likelier to drink sugar-sweetened beverages than children in families where the parents are married, putting them at higher risk for obesity ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Why do people shake hands? A new study suggests one of the reasons for this ancient custom may be to check out each other's odors. Even if we are not consciously aware of this, handshaking may ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — It appears that stress markers in unemployed people can be found, independent of smoking, alcohol consumption and overweight/obesity. Results from a study suggest that long-term unemployment may be ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Doctors write millions of prescriptions a year for drugs to calm the behavior of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. But non-drug approaches actually work better, and carry ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Briefly counseling college students on the dangers of binge drinking is effective in lowering heavy drinking levels among many students, but only temporarily. Three out of four will be right back ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Loneliness brought about by the death of a spouse can trigger a wider network of depression-like symptoms, a study has found, but authors suggest that doctors are often too quick to attribute these ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Family Based Interpersonal Psychotherapy (FB-IPT) is more effective in treating preadolescent children with depression compared to child-centered therapy (CCT), a recent study has found. ... full story

Mar. 3, 2015 — Everyone worries about losing their memory as they grow older—memory loss remains one of the most common complaints of the elderly. But the molecular reasons behind the processes remain unclear, ... full story

Related Stories

June 12, 2014 — Teens who tried to act cool in early adolescence were more likely to experience a range of problems in early adulthood, a study shows. Teens needed more and more extreme behaviors to appear cool, ... full story

Nov. 18, 2013 — Most teenagers who drink alcohol do so with their friends in social settings, but a new study reveals that a significant number of adolescents consume alcohol while they are alone. Furthermore, ... full story

Oct. 2, 2013 — A study has found that approximately one in three teens with bipolar disorder developed substance abuse, for the first time, during 4 years of follow-up. The study also identified several risk ... full story

June 24, 2010 — The teens least prone to heavy drinking had parents who scored high on both accountability and warmth. So-called "indulgent" parents, those low on accountability and high on warmth, nearly ... full story

ScienceDaily features breaking news and videos about the latest discoveries in health, technology, the environment, and more -- from major news services and leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.